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Faces of Research
Tackling
the Real World Problems of Engines and Their Consequences
Interview
with John B. Heywood
Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Director of Sloan Automotive
Lab, and Co-Director of the Ford-MIT Alliance.
Heywood
in Profile
John B. Heywood
What fascinates
you about engines?
What goes on inside
them is very complicated and only partly understood. Non-engineers are
often surprised that we can design good engines, but we really don’t
fully understand what goes on inside. So there are important problems
that still need to be sorted out and that fascinates me. The other is
that it’s very real world. There are on the order of two billion
engines in use in the world today. There’s about 700 million cars,
and all the motor bikes, agricultural equipment like irrigation pumps,
and engines used for producing electricity. Society needs engines, but
engines have some problems. They do mess up the environment and it’s
really important that we work to improve them.
How has the
Sloan Automotive Lab, which you've headed since 1972, evolved?
In the 1960s, there
wasn't a lot going on in the Sloan Automotive Lab, which had been founded
in 1929. So Professor James Keck and I, and then Professor Wai Cheng,
built up a group that worked first on understanding the basic emissions
problems, and now, more broadly, on improving engine performance: How
do you get engines to run more smoothly and efficiently? How do you keep
the friction really low? What fuels can you use in engines? Can you improve
engine performance by improving the fuel?
What draws
students to the Sloan Auto Lab?
Many engineering
students love cars and engines, so one group is drawn because that’s
their passion. Another group in our lab are people who really want to
have an impact on big environmental problems. The discipline of engineering
added to their idealism drives them. And then we get people who are really
interested in the intellectual challenges of disciplines involved: fluid
flows, combustion, and energy conversion. We think that’s a great
mix of people.
What do you
enjoy most about teaching and research?
The thing I enjoy
most is working closely with my graduate students and helping them get
something really worthwhile done. And seeing them both learn and grow
in the process. I get a tremendous sense of satisfaction and learn a lot
by working closely with them.
What is the
Sloan Auto Lab focusing on now?
First, we are working
on two big challenges in gasoline engines. One is meeting very, very demanding
emissions standards. As we look five to ten years ahead, the emissions
standards in the United States for vehicles are going down to really low
numbers. Engines will have to be managed and controlled very carefully.
Another area is to increasing the efficiency of gasoline engines. We’ve
got some novel ideas. In partnership with the Plasma Science & Fusion
Center, we’re using the Plasmatron to convert gasoline to a mixture
of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. If we then put a modest amount of those
gases back with the gasoline in the cylinder, we can change the way we
run gasoline engines to become more efficient.
A second area of
interest is diesel engines. Their major problem is that it’s not
easy to control their emissions to very low levels. So we are trying to
find ways to control emissions in diesel engines and reduce the costs
without losing the benefits.
The third major area
is in engine lubrication and friction. When we’re driving around
in our cars, close to half of the work that we transfer into the pistons
from the gasses inside the cylinder gets used up overcoming friction.
Friction is a really big loss in both gasoline and diesel engines. We’ve
got programs looking closely at how the lubricating oil behaves.
What are
the challenges of your new role as co-director of the Ford-MIT Alliance?
I know Ford well,
both in an organizational sense and I know a lot of the individuals there.
Ford, like all the auto companies, sponsor our Sloan Auto Lab research.
In addition, I've been a consultant to Ford since the early 1970s. So
I said yes when asked to become co-director. It’s more work than
I thought, but it’s very rewarding, because it’s really facing
up to how to make academic engineering, management, and systems research
count in the industrial world. I think the Ford-MIT Alliance is very committed
to finding better and better ways to leverage research that MIT people
want to do – because it’s interesting and it could have impact
– so it does have impact in the industrial engineering world.
What big
engine problems have been solved in the last 25 years?
As an historical
trend, engines are getting better technically about one percent a year.
So for example, the maximum power new engines deliver gets a little higher
every year. And there’s a long list of things for people to develop
and implement that will keep this going. Engines are a competitive market
because there's more production capacity than there is market. In parallel,
we’ve had this remarkably successful reduction in emissions. Gasoline
engine emissions have gone down by a factor of 100 in the past 35 years,
and that’s a major factor in cleaning up air pollution.
What are
the next big engine problem to tackle?
I spend some of my
time on technology forecasting. It’s particularly critical now because
the United States is using energy and petroleum in transportation in ways
that are just profligate. Our energy and petroleum consumption steadily
go up. Growth in other parts of the world is very likely to produce some
severe strains over the next decade as well. So I’ve been identifying
what is really going on, because I don’t think the people down in
Washington are willing to look at this problem carefully enough. We really
need to use less energy by using it much more effectively.
What’s
your best guess about future issues in transportation?
All countries that
start to shift from developing to more developed status have responded
to the demand for mobility. Generally that means people want their own
vehicles and that can produce enormous congestion. You can expand vehicle
fleets far faster than you can expand highways – and you may not
even want to expand highways. Our desire for mobility is very basic and
will always be there. Maybe we can get rid of purely functional trips
that don’t give us much pleasure, such as do our shopping electronically.
And there are ways to provide mobility that don’t use anywhere near
the energy that we use today, obviously by using smaller and more efficient
vehicles. If we really pull out all the stops, we can provide this mobility
and minimize the energy and the other environmental impacts that a very,
very large number of people in vehicles creates.
Heywood
in Profile
"People love
cars, people hate cars," said John Heywood, the Sun Jae Professor
of Mechanical Engineering. "If you tell people at a party that you
work on car engines, they stay and talk. If you tell them you work on
magneto hydrodynamics power generation, their eyes glaze over and they
slide away." Although party chat wasn't the driving motivation, Heywood
does like the public engagement with his engineering research on engines
and their contexts.
Growing up in a London
suburb with a mechanical engineering academic father and scientist mother,
Heywood earned a mechanical engineering degree in 1960 at Cambridge University
before coming to MIT for graduate work. "I was interested in the
intellectual logic behind engineering. I liked using physics to solve
problems where you never really got the end, but you got far enough to
get some useful answers." MIT drew him in part because of his father's
regard for the Institute and in part because the classic books in his
field were written by MIT faculty. "I came to see what the American
way of life was all about and I found MIT very exciting. My original plan
was to stay a year or two, but I got married after I'd been here about
a year." Heywood earned a master's and a PhD while his wife, Peggy,
a Radcliffe undergraduate, earned a master's in social work at Simmons.
Visa requirements sent them back to England for a few years where he worked
for the Electricity Generating Board looking at new ways of generating
electricity.
In 1968 Heywood returned
to MIT as an assistant professor to work on the Mechanical Engineering
Department's new environmental interests. Heywood's academic focus on
thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and combustion turned
to engines and their consequences. In partnership with Professor James
Keck, Heywood spent several decades researching how to improve engines
and reduce their environmental impacts by developing a basic understanding
of what goes on inside them. Producing a classic work of his own, Heywood
published his third book, Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals, in
1988. The Two-Stroke Cycle Engine: Its Development, Operation, and Design
followed in 1999. He's currently working on a revision of the Fundamentals
book.
As teacher and director
of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory since 1972, Heywood has focused on
two broad areas: engines and fuels for future transportation systems and
internal combustion engine processes. In 2003, Heywood became co-director
of the Ford-MIT Alliance, an institute-wide research program financially
administered by CTPID.
Beyond MIT, Heywood
keeps a watercolor box close at hand during his frequent travels, enjoys
garden and home improvement projects, and he is closely involved with
his family. Two sons, James and Ben earned mechanical engineering degrees
from MIT in 1991 and 1993 respectively. A third son, Stephen, an art/English
major, was diagnosed with ALS Lou Gherig's disease in 1998. A new book,
His Brother's Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine by Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Jonathan Weiner, describes Jamie Heywood’s search for treatments
through the family foundation, the Cambridge-based ALS Therapy Development
Foundation, which now runs the world's largest drug-screening program
in a mouse model of ALS.
By Nancy
DuVergne Smith
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